


Afterwards

by Victopteryx



Category: Naruto
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:13:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27074773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victopteryx/pseuds/Victopteryx
Summary: Uchiha Madara was dead. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem.
Relationships: Senju Hashirama/Uchiha Madara
Comments: 5
Kudos: 93





	Afterwards

Uchiha Madara was dead.

Ironically, this didn’t faze him as much as it might have – he’d been dead before, after all. Twice. He was what you might call accustomed to the slow slide into oblivion, the coldness in his limbs slithering into the spaces in his lungs, the wailing panic in his lungs that said _no, please, not yet –_ but that was all five minutes ago. Madara had _died_ five minutes ago, to be precise. There was no more cold, no more fear, no more spasms in the meat of his brain as his body’s systems start shutting down. All in all, it had been a fairly standard death-experience for Madara, which only begged the question: _why was he still here?_

‘Here’ not meaning the wasteland where he’d (hopefully) breathed his last-last, but ‘here’ as in, why was he cognizant of the fact that he didn’t feel cold anymore? Madara was fairly sure he didn’t have a body, at this point. He would turn his head and check, but, well. If Madara had had a mouth with which to irritably huff, he would have done so. Hell, Madara wasn’t even really sure he had a consciousness at _all_ at this point. It was all pretty fuzzy.

“Hey,” Hashirama said.

Madara continued to not-exist, but if he had existed, he would have jumped.

“Sorry,” Hashirama said. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you like that!”

Madara’s non-existence might have shrugged non-committedly, as if to communicate, _Not a big deal, Hashirama. By the way, what the fuck?_

“You’re dead!” Hashirama said brightly.

This was not news to Uchiha Madara. As it has been established, he’s fairly familiar with the sensation.

“Yes, yes, you had all kinds of otherworldly powers, we know,” Hashirama said fondly, waving a hand in the air.

A hand? A _hand_? Where did he get one of those? Did he have a body, too?

“Of course I do!” Hashirama said, laughing. “You do too, I think?”

He _thinks_?

“Well, it’s a little hard to tell, with you all –” Hashirama waved his hand again. If Madara had had eyes, he would have narrowed them jealously. “Not existing, you know.”

This explanation, while sound, wasn’t really doing much to shed light on Madara’s current situation. He was _definitely_ dead. So why was Hashirama here?

“I came looking for you!”

‘Came’ implies a place. Death had always been a very simple affair for Madara – one minute he was bleeding out (or oozing out, in that one particular instance) and in the next, oblivion. Oblivion that he had not been _conscious_ for. There’d never been any ‘places’ to come from in his experience.

“I think you’re just going to have to accept that you might not be as much of an authority on the subject as you’d like to think,” Hashirama said, folding his legs and sitting on the ground.

Wait. Ground?

Hashirama patted the earth next to him. Yep, that was definitely solid ground. Good old dirt. Remember dirt? Madara used to experience dirt – back when he was _alive_.

“Stop being melodramatic and manifest yourself already!” Hashirama said. “I don’t have _eternity_.” He paused, then winked.

‘Just manifest a body, Madara.’ Like it was that easy. Madara didn’t have the faintest clue how to _begin_ to go about ‘manifesting’ or whatever the hell Hashirama had said, and why would he want to, anyway?

“This is taking so _long_ ,” Hashirama said, sprawling backwards and stretching his arms and legs wide. “When I first showed up, I had a body almost _immediately_. Like, ten seconds. Tops.”

And, just like that, Madara suddenly stopped not-existing.

“Fuck you,” he said with the mouth on his face, flexing hands that definitely attached to arms. They even seemed to be _his_ hands, too. Interesting.

Hashirama sat up sharply, beaming. “Ha! I knew that would work –” He scrambled to his feet, then took a double-take at Madara. He coughed delicately into a fist, a faint blush rising on his cheeks. “Forget something?”

Madara looked down at himself. Feet, legs, arms, hands, torso, dick. He looked up. “… No?”

Hashirama’s blush intensified. He was staring determinedly off into the middle distance (whose relative state of existence was still up for debate.) “Your _clothes_ , Madara. I’m wearing clothes. You should also be wearing clothes.”

“When did you become a prude?” Madara asked, cocking an eyebrow. He manifested the clothes, nonetheless.

“It’s not for _me,_ it’s for who we’re meeting!” Hashirama said, allowing himself to peek back in Madara’s direction. The blinding smile returned. “Yes! Great! Alright, are you ready? I’m going to do this next part, because I’m tired of waiting for you to catch up.”

“What next pa –” The rest of Madara’s words were lost, because his mouth – along with everything else – had stopped existing again. Or had it never existed in the first place? No, it had probably existed at some point, because in the next second – or whatever passed for seconds in a place like this – Madara was suddenly existing again, but this time he was half-standing, half-being carried in Hashirama’s arms as they crossed over a tall wooden threshold.

“Whew!” Hashirama said, laughing. “Don’t want to do _that_ again anytime soon – I almost lost my grip on you!”

“Do I want to know?” Madara wheezed, pulling out of Hashirama’s arms. His lungs felt like… well, they felt like they hadn’t existed for a minute there.

“Welcome to The Bar!” Hashirama said, spreading his arms wide.

Madara squinted at him, then turned to take in his surroundings – surroundings that were almost _definitely_ extant to some degree, because the first thing that hit Madara was the smell, followed very quickly by the noise. It was a confusing hodgepodge of sensations, because on one hand, Madara could definitely say, with assurance, that they were standing in the entrance to a large bar of some kind. On the other hand, Madara would not have been able to describe the sights, sounds, or smells of that bar if every poet who had ever lived had given him their tongues.

Picture a bar. The bar Madara and Hashirama were standing in was that bar. Picture another one. It was that bar, too. You get the picture.

Hashirama sauntered up to what could conceivably be called a counter and said, “One bottle of sake, please!”

Madara followed, ducking around a patron (probably, anyway), and meeting Hashirama at the surface as a simple white bottle of sake and two sakazuki materialized in front of them.

“Thanks!” Hashirama said cheerfully to the unknowable void. Then he picked up the bottle.

“Hashirama,” Madara said, watching. “What are you doing?”

“Drinking with a comrade,” Hashirama said, wiggling the bottle at him. “Pick up your cup, don’t make me pour it on the counter.”

Madara sighed, allowed himself to relish briefly in the simple joy of having lungs to sigh with, and picked up the sakazuki.

“I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” Hashirama said as he poured the liquor into the small bowl.

“Drink?” Madara said, watching with mild amusement as Hashirama filled his own cup without compunction.

Hashirama just smiled and lifted the sakazuki to toast. Madara clinked his cup against it, then downed the sake.

As he swallowed, reeling a little from the flavor – which was just as inexplicable as the rest of the bar – Hashirama leaned forward and brushed his lips against Madara’s.

“I was waiting for you,” Hashirama said softly. Then he drained his own cup and set it down determinedly on the countertop. “Alright!” he said, rubbing his hands together.

Madara sternly reminded his lungs that they _did_ exist, and had not _stopped_ existing, and that there was _no_ reason for them to be giving him trouble breathing right now. He set his sakazuki on the counter as well, and braced himself for whatever Hashirama had planned next.

“Hey!” Hashirama called, waving across the bar towards the entrance. “Over here!”

Madara turned to look – only to see a dark blur as something rocketed towards him across the indescribable space. A solid weight hit Madara squarely in the chest; his mouth was suddenly full of black hair that wasn’t his own; a jubilant voice shouted in his ear, “ _Nii-san!_ ”

Madara breathlessly said, “ _Izuna?”_

Beside them, Hashirama turned back to the concept of a bartender and said, “Can we get another round? A bigger bottle this time, please!”

**Author's Note:**

> very dumb little self indulgent fic thank u for reading <3 i always think the hashimada ending in the manga is bittersweet, i honestly like it lmao.


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